Peter Diamandis: ‘AI will become mechanism to dematerialise, demonetise & democratise health, education’

How do you see the rise of AI and its impact on developing nations like India?

AI is growing exponentially, not linearly. We have seen GPT-2 as a preschool and GPT-3 as an elementary school student. We have seen GPT-4 as a high school or college student. GPT-5 will be an expert-level PhD. What is fascinating is that the most powerful technology in the world is effectively available for free.

If you told me 5-10 years ago that we were going to see ChatGPT, Gemini and other language models and what they can do, and that it was free for everybody, I would have said it’s ridiculous, it would never happen. But it has happened. The good news is it is free to everybody with a mobile phone in India. One of the things to appreciate is that the most powerful technology in the world is available to a billion Indians.

The question is on the heels of that, you have the best education in the world available for free to Indians and best healthcare in the world available. AI will become the mechanism by which we dematerialise, demonetise and democratise health and education. There is no way for India to survive and thrive without building on top of this. India cannot physically deliver the level of education and healthcare to its people without this technology.

Now, how do you do that for education and health? What we will see is that the best educators on the planet will be AIs that speak the child’s language. Kids’ favourite movie stars are supporting them through their educational journey. Similarly, with the best health diagnostics. These fundamentals are within reach, and it needs to be the entrepreneurs in India building this for India.

How do you see India positioned in AI-led technology revolution?

First and foremost, what I know and have experienced is that India is going to be an extraordinary force in a positive way in the world in next 30 years. I believe that China has begun to wane in terms of its technology and impact. India is inherently an entrepreneurial nation with a youthful, literate, tech-forward populace, which puts it in a great position.

In the world of AI, three elements are the basis for success – talent, data and compute. There is no question that India has the talent. It can and should have the data.

The important question is going to be that will India develop its own compute. These large language models and computers and clusters they are running on are fundamental infrastructure. We have seen the amazing rise of Jio and the data comp networks here (in India). So it can be done. It’s a matter of who is going to make that investment, or will the nation become dependent upon Google, Microsoft and xAI or others. It is a policy decision that needs to be made. We are seeing places like Saudi and the (United Arab) Emirates really making the decision at the highest level that they must invest in building capacity. I think if India makes that commitment and creates these partnerships, it will become rocket fuel for the country.

You have said India is better positioned than China. Can you elaborate on it?

I say this because China has an ageing population. It does not have a youthful and tech-led population. I think India has the potential to do this. China has got the complete infrastructure and it has got a very aggressive, permissive regulatory structure which is an advantage. I think of China as a single corporation and the companies are apps on this corporation, and they want them to succeed. India’s government needs to have its own summit with entrepreneurs to hear loudly what they need to succeed because there is an incredible future for the nation if you can do that.

How do you see AI disrupting job scenarios?

We are going to see job disruptions and reinventions from two forces. One is AI, which is proving to be an extraordinary tool. Today it is good but when GPT-5 or Claude 4 comes out, these will be PhD level agents that you can have conversations with as you would have with your colleague. If this agent enters into your systems, it can read every email, and message and know everything about you, every conversation you had, every strategic decision that you want to make and become a really useful member in the conversation. That will happen fairly rapidly.

Then you have humanoid robots coming in. These robots are developing at a speed that has been shocking to me. These robots are being enabled by multi-model AI so they can effectively see, think and understand. You can drop a robot into a situation and say please clean up this room or go downstairs and grab something for you, but that’s the earliest. These robots can become the best surgeons in the world because they have all medical knowledge and they share experiences over millions of surgeries.

You can imagine all surgical robots in India sharing their knowledge and experiences. Now this surgical robot can be in the middle of a small village, delivering healthcare. So we have these two forces at play – increasing abundant force where access to education and health, access to food, water and energy are increasing but the jobs of the past are being disrupted, reinvented and many of them are going away.

I think what we are going to see is a phase in which it is going to be you partnering with AI, i.e., AI-human collaboration. Then the question becomes is there a phase in which humans are transitioning to something else. What could that be? Most jobs for humanity are not the jobs we do out as passion or out of aspiring to do those jobs.
These are jobs we do because we need to put food on the table. So the question is will we split the situation and where technology takes care of us and meets our basic needs and so we are not working for money anymore. But if you didn’t have to work for money, maybe it is universal basic income, or maybe it is technological socialism, where it is not the government taking care of you, it is the technology taking care of you, keeping you healthy, feeding you and giving you energy. The question then is what would you do with your life if you didn’t have to do this, you didn’t have to work for money and if you did things because it gave you joy.

What does India need to keep its unicorns in the country?

I have been asking that question all week, over the course of a dozen keynotes and CEO sessions. The feeling I get from everybody is that this is happening. There is tremendous wealth. It can be accelerated by reducing just the fundamental bureaucracy of the nation. It just feels hard to do business in India. When you are working so hard to survive and then you go to the US where it is easier to do things, you stay. So culturally, how do you become a more capitalist society and easier (to do business)? If that happens, India will just be skyrocketing and it will become the number one economy on the planet.

What can India do differently?

I keep on asking what would be needed to unleash India, and what I hear (from entrepreneurs) is less bureaucracy and more rapid approvals. There is a large government sector which finds meaning in regulating…how do you create fast processes so that entrepreneurs, who have an idea and have a business, don’t have to wait for a year for a license and they can do it in a minute? I think this is one of India’s challenges that if successfully overcome would unleash the birth of businesses here.